Extinction Rebellion with warship backdrop. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

It’s a big week for Britain: hosting the G7 Summit, kicking off Euro2020 football (Scotland AND England) and celebrating the Queen’s birthday. Well that’s the story on the front pages of our newspapers anyway. In the bigger picture of Britain’s existential crises – the precarity of well-being, communities and planet – there are few signs of leadership at the national level.

The Prime Minister is doing his best at putting on a good show: ditching the ‘special relationship’ for ‘the indestructible relationship’. However that didn’t deter President Joe Biden from warning Boris that he won’t stand for any threat to the Irish Peace Agreement. Boris’ promise to save the world with vaccine donations was somewhat dwarfed by his decision to cut £4bn to the very countries who need our help.

His ambition to lead the world on the climate crisis (by flying from London to Cornwall) was exposed as a sham by Extinction Rebellion activists, who won’t conveniently overlook the commitment to building roads and runways that break the Paris agreement.

The absurdity of the G7’s spectacle of promises was well countered by activists, dressing up as crows (picking at our corpses) and Pikachus (the cuddliest of capitalists), and offering hugs to policemen desperate to stay friendly.

Meantime, England manager Gareth Southgate paints a somewhat different role for footballers of every nation – but particularly the English – when he talks about their role in social change. Here’s his talk to the nation in The Players’ Tribune:

Our players are role models. And, beyond the confines of the pitch, we must recognise the impact they can have on society. We must give them the confidence to stand up for their teammates and the things that matter to them as people.

I have never believed that we should just stick to football.

…It’s their duty to continue to interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice, while using the power of their voices to help put debates on the table, raise awareness and educate.

..Unfortunately for those people that engage in that kind of (racist) behaviour, I have some bad news. You’re on the losing side. It’s clear to me that we are heading for a much more tolerant and understanding society, and I know our lads will be a big part of that.

It might not feel like it at times, but it’s true. The awareness around inequality and the discussions on race have gone to a different level in the last 12 months alone.

I am confident that young kids of today will grow up baffled by old attitudes and ways of thinking.

I understand that on this island, we have a desire to protect our values and traditions — as we should — but that shouldn’t come at the expense of introspection and progress.

The Queen continues to put a compliant face on it all, tapping her foot to the music while her Kingdom fractures. Although even she is reported to be ready to move past her life-long ‘no comment’ stance as those nearest to her challenge everything that is most fundamental to the 20thC British idea of itself.

The media bubble does its best to shape a clear way forward, each news title taking a stance based on its dustinctive view of the future. Although from a vantage point outside of the political establishment, these differences are slight. None are offering a clear alternative to the others, just a different arrangement of deckchairs on the Titanic: a preferred party in charge, a newly focused budget, a different way of talking about the future, but with few new levers to pull.

Pupa stages, butterflies and complex tech

While our research and engagement over the years has led to a radical set of proposals appearing in our vision of the future – newly articulated in Indra Adnan’s upcoming book The Politics of Waking Up – there is no escaping the current querulousness of all that is emerging. Like the pupa stage of the butterfly, there is much evidence that many have moved on from the caterpillar stage.

As an image, it’s useful. So many feet are obliged to work in unison so close to the ground, like workers on a production line, unable to develop their own unique contribution to the future. Yet in each organism's mind is a dream – an imaginal cell – of a better life.

But the pupa stage is painful. The body turns in on itself, cells attack cells as a new logic appears within the cocoon it has built for itself. Before that begins to look identifiable as the chrysalis which will give way to the butterfly, much of what defined the caterpillar will have been shrugged off to make way for the new. Transformation is powerful but not always gentle and many don’t make it.

Even so, this is not an image of warring elements. The cyclical nature of the change finds a role for every cell of the caterpillar in the butterfly that eventually emerges. Yet now it has an entirely different identity. Now flying, not crawling, now full colour not mono-colour, now delighting – not bugging.

It’s a metaphor that we might all keep in mind as we move determinedly away from the past into the future. At this point of the process none of us know quite what we might look like fully revealed, even if we are confident about our need to move forward somehow.

Many of the experimental spaces that A/UK is part of now hold a lot of caterpillar logic. By this we mean they’re still driven by ‘the unseen hand’ of elite organising – market shaped, male led, mechanical – nudging the feet into action. The more emergent, feminine, participatory system is pointed at but not engaged at the centre of these projects. Even so, that marginal activity, now showing signs of something more fractal – capable of holding the microcosm of a new system – has promise. Like the first intimations of the butterfly to come.

This week, in a six hour gathering of a tech community who were sense making around regenerative platforms, we saw the many stages of butterfly in process. In the plenary, the speakers - inspired and inspiring - were all men (co-chaired by a woman). They shared their updates on moves away from the old technology systems. Their over-arching metaphor was the forging of a diamond through the intense pressurising of coal!

Yet the breakout rooms showed quite a different mix of energies - in particular, a room labelled Patterns of Recognition, hosted by Daniella Stanko and David Kish. Much of what they were sharing reflected what we have been seeing ourselves, in the gradually emerging community agency networks (CANs):

· An acknowledgement of Yin and Yang elements, sometimes equated with male and female ways of working

· Tools for improving human interoperability (Yin)

· Prosocial activism, reducing barriers, using storytelling (Yin)

· Infrastructure that allows regeneration to emerge (Yang)

· Enabling containers through ‘tokenising’ (see Countercoin)

· Governing resources as a commons, to reduce risk (community wealth building)

· Creating a knowledge commons

· Networking to create beneficial interdependencies

· Agent-centric interdependent organisations, redefining value and giving individuals more power, highlighting individual health as synonymous with the health of any regenerative sytem

· Practical regeneration – such as innovation in agriculture, housing and the circular economy

· Localism in context with the planet [or what A/UK calls cosmolocalism]

As the marathon event reached its end, we felt hopeful, for the first time in a while, that a form of tech might be arising that could serve the complexity of human agency. But only if those currently at the centre of the gathering can give way enough to let the margins lead a bit. Watch this space.

Comfort bubbles and difficult dreams

In another space, on the same day, an entirely different conversation about change was occurring, centred around a very alternative piece of technology – the round table. The gathering was supported by the European LIFT project we have been co-creating with Elke Fein, Karen O’Brien and others for almost two years now. Events were under the auspices of the Austrian initiative Days of the Future (initiated by Harald Schellander) – three days of activity that invited new conversations within different sized communities.

Day 1 was the broader, on-line conversation between collaborating partners that touched on sense-making, internationalism and post-Covid formations arising. A strong theme was the role of the arts and nature and the relationship between them. While the fractal organising power of nature offered a lot of confidence to the group, the arts – it was felt - hold an important role in disrupting a tendency to institutionalise too soon or too heavily. While neither of these domains of activity are seen as core to politics today, there was a strong sense in this group that they might be the engines of a politics of the future.

The second day was focused on a local group in Carinthia. At the heart of the community was the Museum Am Bach, whose director Alex Samyi wanted to put art at the service of evolutionary emergence. Using Goethe’s Theory of Colours and the legendary King Arthur’s ideas of governance, he designed a round table to place ad hoc in different parts of the community to engender ‘eye to eye’ conversations.

Following the in situ table event – attended by the Mayor and his deputy – an on-line conversation was held to bring in the wider community. Samyi’s feedback acknowledged that while the table tech was important in bringing new conversations, it could not fix inequality instantly. With the Mayor present, the citizens saw themselves as influencers more than agents of change. This more 45 degree method of change is what has more recently given rise to the more radical call for more “dual power” within society, where people’s ingenuity can work more autonomously and cause greater acceleration for change.

Mycelial structures of trees linked to bitcoin. Image John Upton

That unevenness of input was also reflected in the wider on-line conversation. While the whole group had been led in an exercise to reconnect with nature, there were a number of objecting voices. With memories of decades of disappointment in the old political system, there is plenty of disillusion with activism of any kind. One participant, invited to collaborate further with the local community declared herself ‘bored, tired and sad’ at the prospect. Another, witnessing the joy others felt in connecting with nature, said she only felt grief.

Whereas in the past, we’ve seen such counter voices sabotaging gatherings, this group took it as a signal to go deeper and ask more subtle questions. We forced ourselves to move out of our own comfort bubbles (where our dreams come true). Whatever our vision, like the pupa stage of the butterfly, the path is not an easy one.

This shift in the quality – rather than the quantity – of conversations we encounter and participate in week to week stirs our imaginal cells. Even if we can’t point at the butterflies yet, our collective sense of how they might look is sharpening.

Alternative Editorial: Britain In Transition